Barabbas at Play with The Whiteheaded Boy

Eric Weitz

Consider the magical spaces of a playground: A group of children throw themselves into a fictional universe, inventively living the gap between reality and desire. Some take charge of the fabrication, spawning a world of make-believe from the raw materials of body and voice. Others adopt a more physically passive part, but are no less involved in the pretending; they join in the adventure by endowing the real, live actions of their playmates with fantastic meanings.

Viewed at such an angle, what is theatre, other than a grown-up form of communal playing not far removed from the fields of childhood? According to the writings of child psychologist D.W. Winnicott, play functions as a self-generated bridge between the “inner psychic reality” of needs and wants, and an external reality, which we discover at an early age to be incapable of willed obedience. Play seeks relief from the tyrannies of “reality” by endowing the here-and-now with alternative significances. On the playground or in the theatre, a wooden platform becomes a bed, a deserted island, a time machine, a sleeping giant, an automobile, and all of these things in rapid succession. The player turns into a star football player, a dragon, a favourite aunt, a feared teacher, a future self, or a wind storm, just by saying so. “When I do this”, a child or performer announces, snapping her fingers, “it means I’m invisible”.

Through these momentary flights we glimpse the player’s inner progress, not only the subjects of preoccupation, but their psychic shadings, how they please, unsettle, entice, or tickle the fancy. In the theatre, practitioners and spectators co-operate in the realisation of fictional worlds, cobbled together from the trappings of real life and animated by society’s collective inner currents.

All theatre can be seen to spring from a spirit of play, of pointedly reworking the world under a licensed dispensation from social “realities”. Theatre has become a sophisticated rite, acquiring a system of rules or “conventions” to broker absent events from actual presences; at advanced levels it seeks an unabashedly adult refinement, an immediate but practiced play world pinned in the air for each new audience. Given the confluence of history, routine, and co-operative pretending which subtends every performance, it can indeed be tempting to use theatre as the plaything itself – which brings us to Veronica Coburn, Raymond Keane and Mikel Murfi, also known as Barabbas… the Company.

This essay does not intend to revise Barabbas’ arrival to a place of prominence on the Irish theatre scene since their inception in 1993, nor to provide a definitive assessment of their rehearsal and performance techniques; and it by no means intends a critique or unravelling of Lennox Robinson’s original text for The Whiteheaded Boy. It is concerned with an abiding sense of “playing with theatre”, always part of the package in a Barabbas venture. It focuses upon aspects of the play spirit inherent in the theatre event, but given a pride of place in Barabbas’ production of Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy, which first saw the light of a stage in autumn 1997. It also suggests that such a spirit of theatrical playing, while sharing a private joke with the audience, serves to open otherwise unused windows for the perception of life.

Barabbas have become known for a style of clown-based physical theatre, whose underpinning discipline produces the circumstances for play’s best discoveries. A playful quality of behaviour loosens, floats, “frees” its participants from the earthbound embrace of physical laws and social codes, denying worldly obstacles their usual powers. It is by no means new or unusual to approach theatre with a heightened spirit of play toward creative possibility, a “willingness to try, willingness to poke”, as paraphrased by Veronica Coburn, presently the company’s artistic director. Like other troupes, Barabbas use an array of games and playful techniques in the rehearsal room, very often with an eye toward the physical and mental demands to be met in the work session.

In retrospect, Barabbas and Lennox Robinson’s 1916 play, The Whiteheaded Boy, would seem destined for one another. Feeling somewhat “devised out” in the middle of 1997, the threesome were inclined to look for something text-based. They were again in cahoots with director Gerry Stembridge, with whom they had worked on Macbeth in 1994 and who chairs their Board of Directors. One might imagine the initial spirit of round-table foolery with which someone tossed out the idea of tackling a chestnut by the exceedingly respectable Robinson. But the play spirit has everything to do with pursuing the unlikely, and Gerry came back with The Whiteheaded Boy. He recalls the perfect lateral logic of seeking to mine the company’s European-inflected style side by side with their indigenous Irishness:

I kind of thought if they tackled an old Irish play, it has the advantage of having all the things that theatre audiences like – it has plot and story and yarn and characters that they’ll recognise – and so there’s the possibility of getting that popular response to it. And then they’re allowed into the secret, if you like, of also Barabbas being different to that.

Gerry’s accompanying concept for the show sprouted fully formed with his choice of text: “There’s a very simple idea behind it which also has to do with Barabbas as a company, how they like to present themselves. We wanted to emphasise, “Look, all this stuff is very easy; it’s just about telling a story. It’s what kids do, they act out a story”.

Barabbas’ production of The Whiteheaded Boy is literally playful in its premise of three people “making the world” through their own devices. Since the “Original” run in the Project @ the mint, it has toured Ireland, Britain and the U.S. There is, built into the event, an almost unnerving lack of pretence in the way Veronica, Raymond and Mikel welcome theatregoers to the performance as “themselves” (which, in later incarnations has involved going into the auditorium). Their casual behaviour dismantles the formal, even stodgy, barrier we’ve come to take for granted between performers and audience, which after all are just a bunch of people occupying the same space. “Brechtian” stage worlds are not uncommon, but they are rarely installed with comparably unforced candour. We know very well the show has been previously rehearsed and performed. But the unusually open-handed approach emphasises the sense of co-operation between practitioners and spectators always required for theatre to transpire: it is a genuine invitation to play, which envelops the ensuing ceremony of performance in a heightened air of complicity.

Robinson’s play might be described as a light satire on small-town pretension and family machinations, with a whiff of the political allegory claimed by the playwright about Ireland’s relationship with Great Britain. It depicts the Geoghegan household upon the return of its favourite son, Denis, who was meant to have been gathering prestige upon the clan at medical school up in Dublin, but whose independent spirit perpetually confounds family plans.

For a dramatic text written under the staid conventions of the well-made play, the production rebuffs traditional analysis, ever unfolding on and between the two levels of Robinson’s fiction and Barabbas’ enactment. As hosts of the stage world, Veronica, Raymond and Mikel take on all the roles save one, without respect to age and gender. They deliver the text more intact than the playwright could have imagined, taking turns in voicing the original stage directions, surely written out of Robinson’s own sense of play. What are usually unadorned instructions to the practitioner or armchair reader, in this case adopt an ostentatiously subjective register, more suitable to a novel’s narrator or a storyteller, as if spoken by a character who oversees the proceedings and provides clucking commentary. Here is an extract from the opening stage directions, rather interesting in tone for the one part of the script the audience doesn’t usually see or hear:

William Geoghegan (God rest his soul) was a very genteel man, and when the wife bought him the house and the bit of land instead of getting a tenant for it like a sensible man (and the whole village knew Clancy, the vet, was mad to take it), nothing would do him but live in it himself and walk down to his business every day like a millionaire. ‘Tis too high notions poor William always had…

The stage world builds upon an openly playful approach to characterisation, highlighted by the fact that Veronica, Raymond and Mikel do not pretend to be anyone more than themselves taking on fictional roles, as established by their pre-performance conduct. Dressed for uniform neutrality in trousers, jerseys and waistcoats, they make a point of “putting on” characters which are cut from thicker, broader stylistic cloth than their real-life behaviour. Although crisply staged and well-rehearsed, they allow us to see the fun-loving fraction of their own psyches that spill over the sides of fictional character.

These thumbnail physical signatures and matching voices redolent of Co. Cork, seem to comprise an album of country caricatures known to every Irish theatregoer. But it is as if, under the guiding hand of Lennox Robinson, the performers have stumbled upon an array of comically human archetypes. As one reviewer observed during the production’s swing through Wales: “Although the play is set in Ireland, the eccentric characterisations portrayed can be found in any village anywhere”. This inkling of the universal is worth a closer look.

Raymond does a memorable Mrs Geoghegan, the widowed nurturer of the family, described in the stage directions as “a hearty woman yet”, “not more than sixty-five years of age”, having “such a pleasant way with her”, and “not what I’d call a clever woman”. He inhabits the role by softening his mien, bringing his elbows close to his body, while allowing his hands to float generally upward, one to his collar, the other, bent at the wrist, palm up and fingers gently curled. His head sits slightly back of his shoulders; his facial features knit toward his forehead in a mask of practised concern, a pinched quality carried through in his voice. When under attack his Mrs Geoghegan is stoically defensive, clenched fist to mouth as if squeezing a hanky to choke off the tears.

Raymond enters the role from his default or “neutral” bearing, which throws the palette of fictional character into starker relief. There is no change of costume or make-up: whatever skill is brought to bear in playing the character, the brute features of Raymond’s presence remain unhidden. The characterisation is in no way a camp caricature in walk or speech. The expressions of his “womanly” and “maternal” behaviour, though not ridiculed, are accented and clearly emanate from the body of someone who is, to say the least, not the character in the flesh.

All of Barabbas’ characterisations in this production gain their sweep by “playing” with choice details of human behaviour, an approach justified by the premise. They receive licence to bypass realistic faithfulness to any given original, and so throw the net wider via more broadly recognisable streaks of personality rendered in boldface. At the same time, the performers do indeed hurl themselves into the fictional situations with childlike abandon; the characters would not resonate as they do if these highlights of human gesture were not infused with the textures of organic feeling whose truths we know in our bones.

It should be noted that “character” does not appear in a vacuum; its attributes emerge through engagement, externally and internally, with specific situations. Robinson’s “inner” blueprint, of course, foresees a matrix of potential interpersonal transactions. The “Outer” structure, contributed by Barabbas, means that all three performers may have to keep several onstage characters involved in the action at any given time. The playful spirit, then, needs the support of a theatrical sensibility.

Gerry allocated the roles more or less from the start, according to his assessments of textual logistics and the performers’ personalities. During early rehearsals, the company experimented with various incarnations for their respective characters. Sociocultural observation was supplemented by technical considerations, ways of helping the audience to separate characters on sight.

Mikel, for instance, portrays three characters, all of which distinguish themselves physically and otherwise within his personal brand of daft intensity: As George, the eldest of the Geoghegan offspring, described as “always terrible industrious”, he adopts a granite-like, forward-leaning carriage; he is apoplectically serious, with a brow-furrowed face, muscle-bound speech, and the obsessive behavioural tic of smoothing his hair across his forehead. His Jane Geoghegan, a “nice quiet girl”, contrasts in almost every way, upright and willowy, with a glowing smile, breathy voice and a shyness built in to her movement. And he endows Baby, the youngest of the Geoghegan sisters, with the semblance of a cartoon duck, body lurching awkwardly over pigeon toes, tongue lolling between lips, hands splayed, eyes wide and clueless – she is an unrestrained caricature of the “great lump of a girl” described in the stage directions.

There is ongoing amusement derived from watching the performers try to keep faith with the established “rules of play”: All three track their characters through scenes, which becomes especially difficult when the stage gets “crowded”; someone might pop up for a line here, a bit of stage business there, leaping elsewhere again for a third contribution. Everyone has to conduct at least one short scene with themselves. These duologues, usually seen as comic tours de force, challenge the performers’ theatrical proficiency in on-the-spot playing. And by expanding the scope from single character to both sides of a conversation, they afford mischief with the nature of interaction itself.

At one point, George and Jane have a sub-scene together. George sits at the table, nearly doubled in consternation about a telegram concerning the latest shame Denis brought upon the family. Jane has previously been placed as standing next to him, profile away. In this case, character qualities conspire with stage positioning to afford optimum contrasts:

JANE: What is it, George?

GEORGE: “Geoghegan’s Hope also ran”. That’s either a race horse, or it’s Denis himself.

JANE: I don’t understand you.

GEORGE: He’s either broken his word to me and is betting on horses again, or else … he’s failed again.

JANE: His examination, you mean?

GEORGE: I do.

JANE: God help us!

The sequence is exhaustively honed and precisely executed so that each character’s physical and emotional mark can be hit with minimal “leakage”. The three short lines at the end of the exchange bring about a miniature snowballing effect. Mikel bounces up and down between characters like a human jack-in-the-box, the contrast amplified in the antithetical vocal timbres. Filling out the impression is the volley between comically contrasting inner lives, George seized by volcanic, self-righteous passion counterpointed against Jane’s retiring naiveté.

These playful conceptions push performance technique to its realisable limit, an impressive accomplishment not lost upon the spectator if Mikel fulfils his obligation to the stage world without faltering. In addition, the silly spectacle of these opposing personas emanating rapidly from a single performer’s body moves any satiric stance back a full step to take in the full unit of interpersonal conflict. Mikel’s enactment skewers not only the individual types, but the tenor of their transaction, a resonance patently unapproachable by more realistic, less playful, theatrical representation.

Barabbas’ rehearsal process includes a fair degree of discussion, complementing the nuts and bolts of practical rehearsals. The mad machine of The Whiteheaded Boy underwent an ongoing self-examination as to the fitness of this comic moment or that with reference to the world that was taking shape. In the following sequence, the production “plays with playing” in a manner that stretches the established stage world.

Baby has originally been described as “a great one for music”, and opens Act III singing. The piano, in the style of the other onstage furniture, is shaped like the real thing, but a two-dimensional keyboard is pasted where the real one would be. As Baby, Mikel launches into “playing” with an over-the-top delight to a sound cue of someone splashing about on the keys. He flails at the “keyboard”, occasionally adding a flourish by reaching one hand over the other, this by way of accompaniment as he drones a remote semblance of “Because God Made you Mine” (the religious song called for in the script) loudly on a single, excruciating note. The opening lines of the scene go as follows:

KATE: That’s lovely, Baby. You’ve a great turn for music.

BABY: I have, then. I love them passionate songs. There’s some like comics, but give me a song with passion in it. It goes through me like. I suppose I’m queer.

KATE: Why wouldn’t you like them? Myself, I could never tell one tune from another, but I’d listen to you all day.

The production, which for the most part remains faithful to the fictional reality in its heavily stylistised way, in this case “plays” with its own premise by setting it loose. The characters deliver the above lines without conscious irony. The contrast between their conversation and Baby’s rapturously tone-deaf musicality is, of course, seen as highly comic, but occurs as a result of a special liberty taken in the space between fictional strip and phenomenal depiction. The sequence extends the range of play another decimal point, as it were, by stepping wholeheartedly toward the ridiculous.

Similar comic detours are taken periodically. But they would have been mulled over among the group during rehearsals, with an eye toward maintaining an integrity to the stage world and a “truthful core” to the characters, no matter how outrageous. Veronica says: “The job we have is to play with it enough so that it’s interesting and good, but not play with it so much that you lose the heart of the play”. Ultimately Gerry saw this sequence as involving a character less central to the plot, whose momentary extravagance could well serve to goose the start of the third act: “When you look at the range of some characters, even within the general physical range of the way they’re doing some of them, some characters have to be taken better care of and some characters still have the possibility of being let loose”. One can indeed discern a sort of sliding scale from the characters central to the plot, like George, Aunt Ellen, Mrs Geoghegan and Duffy, to more peripheral ones like Baby, Peter and Hannah, who are allowed longer leashes in the service of comic effect.

Several aspects of Barabbas’ theatrical play spirit can be seen to entwine in the following single sequence. In Act III, John Duffy and Aunt Ellen are left onstage, a widower and dowager upon the brink of a long-delayed romantic connection. Raymond plays Duffy, the sly, small-town entrepreneur, as a chronically humourless rail of a man, his trunk arched slightly forward and eyes steeled, his prune-like lips maintaining parsimonious account of the very words that escape them. Veronica’s Aunt Ellen, a woman who long ago chose to bypass romance for business, rests a pair of spectacles low on her nose, turns down the corners of her mouth, and outlines in body and metabolism the toll taken by gravity – physical and spiritual – over the years.

There is a delectable anticipation to the scene, well prepared by Robinson. Duffy has earlier proposed marriage to Aunt Ellen, with whom he was once linked romantically. Her acceptance is his secret demand for the withdrawal of a potentially costly and scandalous civil suit against young Denis, who has reneged on his own engagement to Duffy’s daughter. Comic irony abounds as Aunt Ellen, in the company of the three young Geoghegan women, “innocently” expresses interest in a wedding dress pictured in Vogue magazine. “Listen to them all laughing”, the narrator says of the sisters, who are at all times unaware of the amorous undercurrents. Duffy arrives, asking veiled questions about his proposal, while Aunt Ellen maintains straight-laced indifference.

Finally, the two are left alone, though only in the fictional sense. Mikel has just completed two lines as narrator, clearing the room of the sisters. Duffy stands stiffly, several strides away, left hand behind his back and the right one clenched close to his mouth, apparently unable to break the ice. Mikel prepares to observe the ensuing scene from slightly upstage. The two characters appear locked at some emotional impasse, Duffy struck speechless and Aunt Ellen wilfully lost in her magazine.

The space separating Aunt Ellen and Duffy will be easily recognised as one of those yawning chasms felt between two people, neither of which knows quite how to take the first step towards broaching a monumental issue. Ironic perception is enhanced by the playful style of characterisation, which revels in showing both the hardened shells of these two old coots and the born-again romantic impulses beneath.

After several seconds of silence, Mikel starts to show his growing impatience on behalf of the audience. With a final gesture of exasperation, he proceeds to lift Duffy/Raymond in his frozen pose and transport him right next to Aunt Ellen/Veronica. He then manually pushes Raymond’s trunk over slightly so Duffy’s head will be close to Aunt Ellen’s, thereby jump-starting the scene.

In a flash, the production has pulled the pants down around theatre convention’s ankles. It has, in effect, blithely broken the rules, reminding us of the artifice we routinely agree to forget when we settle into the theatre seat. But what gives the moment its huge comic charge is its play with the emotional tension that grounds the real-life situation. Yes, the characters and situation are keyed for amusement. But the moment has no real hook without the spectator’s first-hand recognition of this emotional petrifaction. This is precisely one of the places where play and theatre intersect, working through psychic tensions by enacting variations on reality. The solution, so simple as to be invisible, seems dropped from the sky. In an act of communal wish fulfilment, Mikel makes “external reality” obey his will by enacting a level of being usually reserved for gods and fairies. By momentarily overriding the pretence of realistic theatre convention, the production also admits a fleeting perception about the strange hardness of human emotions.

Although occupied with the business of disengaging reality, play nonetheless adopts its own set of rules. It is the production’s self-imposed obligation to the dramatic text and the maintenance of a certain continuity which creates the conditions for some of its comic effects. One of the most notable features of the production’s theatrical play is its capacity to subvert even itself. By midway through Act I, the stage world has been outlined in terms of three performers from the spectator’s own reality, acting and narrating a play they have either rehearsed or collaborate on intuitively. But the entrance of actor Louis Lovett, who plays Denis, asks for the first time that the spectator buy into a theatrical illusion – not an intrusion from the real world, but from the fictional world.

Upon the usual introduction – Veronica as narrator says, “Ah! Here’s Denis in the other door. Isn’t he lovely? You’d know he was from Dublin by his clothes and his smartness. He’s just turned twenty-two” – Mikel has already assumed the role centre stage, epitomising in the production’s caricatured style an urbane and confident young fellow, cigar in one hand and brandy snifter in the other. But Louis arrives, apparently “the character himself”, embodied in a more old-fashioned theatrical style, with heavily blushed cheeks and bright blond hair, fully costumed in cream suit, scarf and checked vest. His appearance, with an acting style somehow lower-keyed than the rest of the fiction, marks him as made from “Other material” than the rest of the people in the stage world.

Louis is put forth as a (rather Pirandellian) pure inhabitant of the fictional world, and the other three performers behave as if he is an “unexpected” addition to their storytelling. They go through phases of surprise, confusion, amusement and reluctance, as if unsure they should receive his alien presence into their reality. Denis/Louis says, “Hullo, mother”; Raymond suddenly “decides” to continue the play and snaps into Mrs Geoghegan’s character. “she” catapults onto Louis’ hip, arms around his neck and both legs airborne in double arabesque, for the line, “Denis! My darling boy!”

The production culminates in the act of Louis/Denis earning induction into the bodied status occupied by the other three performers, by receiving one of their costumes and “learning” a bona fide character stance. He is, in effect, trading in his “fictionality” to become “real” – or is it the other way around? The scene unfolds, not as an ultimate comic coup, but as a rather touching ritual of acceptance. A more “realistic” production might seek to distinguish Denis from the others primarily through casting or costume. But herein lies the secret value of theatre’s expanded playing field for a company like Barabbas – there are perceptions to be imparted about our dealings with others, about “fitting in”, about the notion of reality itself, and rather than the stage world just talking about them, or showing them in the same surface-oriented terms we see every day, the production makes them playfully manifest.

Looking from overhead, it is no exaggeration to suggest that a palpable play spirit presides over Barabbas’ production of The Whiteheaded Boy. Robinson contributes a vehicle with its own cynical soft spot for various socio-cultural targets; Barabbas suggest themselves as the winking agents of metaphysical cause and effect, at once cheeky and sympathetic toward the world and its goings-on. Their host personalities and inflated characterisations pitch the text more familiarly for a contemporary audience – the fiction, while fully inhabited, is seen through inverted commas. In fact, the concentric worlds created by Barabbas’ presence and make-believe serve to collapse the distance between today’s audience and the conditions of Robinson’s original. Spectators with tastes for the traditional gain access to the time-honoured texture of an early Abbey original; the more theatrically highbrow get a jazzy take on an old play, to which they can apply words like “post-modern” and “deconstruction”.

Such is the nature of play for grown-ups offered by Barabbas in this hugely popular production. Under their diligent guidance, people are drawn nightly to contemplate some of the things that still press upon adult psyches 80-odd years after The Whiteheaded Boy was born, questions about appearances and truth and humankind’s little blemishes. The performers invite collusion in a world tuned risibly to these issues, its building blocks open to the same healthy disrespect, and from the stage they can feel the recognition in our laughter. That, of course, is a factor one can lose sight of amid the admiration for theatre’s magical spaces: the ability to view something in a spirit of play also happens to be a defining condition for laughter, and it does tend to make the occasion quite a lot of fun. Now is that the crowning bonus or the most important feature of all?

Works Cited:

Ellis, M.J., (1973), Why People Play (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall)

Huizinga, Johan, (1955), Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture (Boston: Beacon; orig. German pub. 1944)

Lowenfeld, Margaret, (1991), Play in Childhood (London: Mac Keith, orig. pub. 1935)

Murray, Christopher, (1997), Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University)

O’Neill, Michael J., (1964), Lennox Robinson (New York: Twayne)

Robinson, Lennox, (1982), The Whiteheaded Boy in Selected Plays: Lennox Robinson, Introduction by Christopher Murray (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 63-117)

Wilshire, Bruce, (1982), Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University)

Winnicott, D.W., (1991), Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991; orig. pub. 1971)

Personal unpublished interviews: Veronica Coburn, Raymond Keane, and Mikel Murfi (May, 1997); Gerry Stembridge (May, 1998); Veronica Coburn (March, 1999)

Extract From: Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, edited by Eamonn Jordan (2000)

Cross Reference: Esssay on Gerard Stembridge and essay by Mikel Murfi on Enda Walsh’s work

See Also: The Story of Barabbas, The Company, by Carmen Szabo, For the Sake of Sanity: Doing things with humour in Irish performance, edited by Eric Weitz, The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish Theatre, edited by Eric Weitz